“This is really the complexity of siting a waste site,” she said. “Scientists on site are in a predictive mode. And what makes it more difficult is that you’re trying to predict health risks tens of thousands of years from now based often on whether or not there might be a collective memory in the future that nuclear waste is buried in this spot.”

Nuclear waste, danger, important, whatever. It’s that last bit that I find fascinating—how do you make people in the future remember where a nuclear waste disposal site is located? And how do you warn them not to dig it up? A decade is easy enough. But a hundred years? A thousand? Ten thousand?